Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [310]
Placide drew himself up and saluted; Captain Daspir made as if to return the salute, but a hitch in his right arm prevented him from completing the movement. He nodded distantly and passed on without breaking his stride. His footsteps beat toward Lacroix’s lines, then suddenly stopped. Placide caught Morisset’s sleeve but could not speak.
“Aux armes!” came Daspir’s voice. “A spy! A spy!”
Then the three of them were running hard in the direction they had come from. The commotion in the camp was not very far behind them, but then, within a minute, firing broke out on the line to the right, beyond the tent they had discovered, in the direction of the river. From the volume, there seemed to be quite a number of men engaged, but they did not stop to study the situation. By the time they rejoined Guerrier they had shaken any pursuers.
“That was his tent,” Placide panted. “Leclerc. We’ve found him.”
“Yes,” said Morisset. “But what was that shooting on the line?”
“A gang of the field hands passed this way,” Guerrier told them. His voice was muffled by a rag he’d tied across his face to block the stench. “A little while ago, I couldn’t stop them. It may be that they followed us from Savane Brulée.”
“Toute grâce à Dieu!” Morisset said, and Placide saw his smile gleam in the moonlight. “If not for them we’d likely have been captured.”
“And what of them now?” Placide turned his face toward the shooting, which seemed to be slackening a little.
“Let them look to themselves—they weren’t ordered here,” said Morisset. “And we must go back quickly to make our report.”
In the course of the long blistering afternoon in the fort, a chorus started up among the wounded. Bay nou dlo oubyen lamò! A man with a head wound had begun it—there was nothing wrong with his lungs. No effort of the doctor’s could quiet him, and soon the others had taken it up. Give us water or give us death!
“Well, maybe we should kill them,” Bienvenu murmured.
The doctor looked about the area. Of the nine hundred men Dessalines had left to man the fort, half or more were now dead or incapacitated. They’d been starving for days, but no one dared name the notion of surrender. It seemed indeed that no one desired to. Yet the arrival of Dessalines’s ring was certainly an event of some significance. Lamartinière was in close council with Marie-Jeanne and the surviving officers now.
“Not yet,” the doctor mumbled. Then, shifting his penny from his sore tongue, “Let us wait till night, at least—I think that something is going to happen.”
An hour after nightfall, Marie-Jeanne came to let the doctor and the musicians know that the fort would be evacuated. The doctor had drawn that conclusion some time before, since the men had spent the afternoon making cartridges and packing their ammunition boxes to the brim, and Marie-Jeanne had been offering water every three hours instead of every six, and by the cup instead of the spoonful. The wounded had at last got enough water to quiet them temporarily. They had not deduced, as the doctor had, that they would certainly be left behind when the able-bodied men marched out of the fort.
Still, Lamartinière held the garrison waiting throughout three quarters of the night. The doctor lay on his mat, unable to sleep. He watched the half-moon rise above the walls, saw the Great Bear lumbering up the dome of the sky. Gaston offered another meal of shoe leather, which the doctor declined, reasoning that he’d either be dead or in range of better provisions soon enough. There were a couple of bombardments, around eleven and one o’clock, but neither lasted long or had much effect.
Two hours before dawn, Marie-Jeanne returned to